


Wildcat

by aurora_borealis



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:55:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26365306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: Cats always land on their feet. Not every time, technically, but a lot of the time. Enough to make a difference.(Half a year in Kotku's life.)
Relationships: Kotku/Boris Pavlikovsky, Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 13
Kudos: 19





	Wildcat

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for sexual abuse and domestic violence.

“ _Born down in a dead man's town/The first kick I took was when I hit the ground_ ”

\- “Born in the USA,” Bruce Springsteen

“ _First I cried for him and then I cried for me/Haunted by the ghost of the girl I used to be/But the rocks with holes are warm in my hands/And I buried my toes in the hot hot sand/And the silver pink pony kisses me and says/You've come a long, long way and you deserve to be really happy_ ”

-“The Beer,” Kimya Dawson

**Wildcat**

_

_Once, there was a girl, from just outside one of the most exciting and notorious cities in the whole country, one that people visited in masses, but understood in far fewer numbers. It was a different time, but it was only some years ago. It was a different time, but so much would have happened the same if it happened now. This city has a strange relationship with time. It is always looking back, but not too far back for comfort, and everyone who looks into it from outside gets bored and looks away very soon._

Maybe this is how your story would start, if it were to be told, in part or in full. To give context, and understanding, if anyone would want it. Or maybe it would be a story just for you.

Yes. That way it can be more honest. That way no one else can tell it, and make their own version. _Once there was a girl from a city they all said was Sin but came to anyway, and no one had ever known her completely, and this, she thought, would give her a small but vital amount of freedom, if not safety. She did not believe in safety, not anywhere. But she believed in her home, even when she was not sure what else to think of it._

_

You always knew you were going to go back home, because all this time, you had kept thinking of it as your home. The city was your home in a general sense, sure, but the rooms you and your mom share in the R&R on the side of the highway that give a better view of sunsets than any tourist site, that was the place your mind associated with the word home.

You figured that your mom probably learned why you left pretty soon after you did, and that the man calling himself her boyfriend probably wouldn’t have stayed around much longer anyway. They never do. It’s not her fault they’re not the kind to stay, and it’s not her fault that sometimes they’re the kind to do what he did. It’s their responsibility to not be like that, but they can’t take responsibility. Sometimes taking responsibility isn’t some huge gesture or something that takes a lot of work or a long time. Sometimes it’s just _not_ doing something, or understanding something and living with it and accepting it.

(One of the last men in the city before you go back home was a tourist- really a businessman, but business trips may as well be vacations the way some of these guys act when they’re here. It was interesting that he acted like he was worried about you. He asked if anyone was forcing you to be here, but you could tell he was also kind of worried about himself in case you were involved with anyone dangerous or were one of those undercover cops that go in disguise as young girls. Maybe he watched a lot of mob movies. You can’t think of any reason why the mob, or what’s left of it here now that it’s the twenty-first century and _Casino_ is a historical movie, would want anything to do with you. He asked you if anyone knew where you were. Not like he was threatening you. Like he was really wondering what your life was when he wasn’t there. Like he was wondering if he was actually going to threaten you or act on any threats, how long would it take people to find out something was wrong, would anyone find out, would anyone care. You said you knew where you were, you knew this city like the back of your hand, and then you didn’t say anything else about it, and he looked like he had his answer. He looked uncomfortable and then put all that away. Maybe he was thinking about how he was the only person who knew exactly where you were in that moment. And the fact that he, with his expensive watch and thick briefcase and important business meetings, came from such a different world that he wasn’t sure whether or not such knowledge was a responsibility or not, and what he was supposed to do with it.)

“Kerry, my little wildcat,” your mom once said to you, “no one can _ever_ control you.” And at the time you’d thought maybe she meant to praise you, but also maybe she was trying to tell you- any time someone tries to control you, remember.

You hadn’t left her without a word- you didn’t want her to think you were dead or had been kidnapped. You were getting by, you told her. You were alive. You didn’t tell her everything even though after a while she probably figured a little of it out, or more.

She’s not a bad mother. That’s what people think. And you realized that the older you got, people saw you, too, as bad, maybe worse than her, and it didn’t matter anymore if you were a good or bad daughter. No one was ever going to see you as good anyway. Well, maybe some people. But the people who get to say who is and isn’t good, you know exactly what they think. They always end up telling the truth about it.

It’s a late afternoon and the dry heat and open air are powerful, as endless and forceful as the ocean, which you’ve never seen. But you’ve seen pictures and videos and your old friend Tina would tell you about the Gulf of Mexico and what it was like, when she was there. It’s the end of springtime and in the desert this doesn’t mean flowerbeds the color of Easter candy wrappers and pastel wardrobes, but a large mass of tourists for the warmer months and spring break kids and such. It’s already begun. In a way it’s always time for the tourists to come here. They say in their travel columns in magazines that no one should stay more than three days. But you’ve lived here all your life. Do tourists have different rules, or do people think living here alters you fundamentally from how you should be? Do they think this city is like another planet or dimension, or like the mythic underworld entire countries of people believed in thousands of years ago, where the spring goddess could only ever stay for the winter, only a select set of months and never anything beyond that because that was nature? 

It’s a late afternoon in the spring and you just got off the bus and you walked down the highway and now you’re at the door of your room at the R&R and your hand is reaching out to knock, your fist up, but not to fight, not this time. Your hands always go easily into the fist position- “you’re a fighter, Kerry,” your mother said once- and fighters are survivors. When you knock on the door it’s forceful, but not fighting it. Just telling it, I’m here, I’m back, I’m alive. 

_

But when the door opens you immediately realize what you feel is exhaustion. Physically tired right down to the marrow of your bones, you just want to lie down and sleep, in what is your own bed but hasn’t been for a while. The sheets have been cleaned, and in the months since you’ve been gone, the air circulating around the entire motel area would have been entirely new particles. Like it had been cleaned out as well. And he is gone, really gone. He wasn’t even your stepfather, so you never had to tell him he couldn’t tell you what to do because he wasn’t your real father, and he could never have said _I am your new father_ or even _I’m the man of this house_ because he wasn’t, he had a place of his own and he came and stayed as he pleased and probably had other girlfriends he was seeing.

Walking in, it’s like no one would ever know that he was never there in the first place.

_

His name was Bradley. Is. It’s so easy to say was, because he’s no longer in your life, just a part of your past. For the rest of your life he’ll be a was, and you wonder about the people who he’s an _is_ to now, if he’s doing anything to them.

You have a feeling he’ll always be a was, for the rest of you and your mom’s lives. Some guys, when they leave, they don’t come back. And it’s for the better. You’re left all alone to pick up the mess they leave behind but they don’t come back and make any new dents or breaks or crashes. There are things worse than being alone, and Bradley was one of them. Was. He’s dead to you, you sometimes allow yourself to think, like a whispered secret. He’s dead to you, he may as well be dead, and you’re alive.

You’re alive, you think every night when you go to sleep, every morning when you wake up. You’re still alive. Now what?

_

Home. How do you define it? That was a question you were asked to answer for a composition in Civics, and you hammered something out on the school computer and got a passing grade, but that’s not the kind of question you can think of in terms of a school assignment.

Home feels like hearing the song “Runaway Love” on the radio for the first time. Home feels like wondering if you’re going to die here. Home feels like not knowing what else in the world there is. Home feels like loving a place, and love has an honest perspective, not one of idolization. Love looks through tired, bloodshot eyes.

_Once there was a city as new to history as the American Dream, in a place infinitely older than the concept of an America to have dreams of. The city was called Las Vegas. It was called Sin City and the Entertainment Capital of the World and Lost Wages and, at the same time as all this, the City of Second Chances. And there was a girl who grew to know this city like it was her own bedroom, just as she knew second chances were rare and hard to come by, and sometimes no one gave them to you- sometimes you had to give them to yourself. Maybe it was the same everywhere. It probably was. But that was how it was there, and that was all she knew, and she had no choice but to learn, and some knowledge you have to learn. You can learn a lot about the world from learning about one place. But you can also go to a place without learning anything. Like many of the tourists this girl met. Like many of the people who came to this city, like many of the people and their descendants who came to the country that became America. Because sometimes home is what is right, but sometimes it isn’t._

That would be what you would say if you had to write a textbook about what home is. If someone- archaeologists or aliens or whoever would bother to remember you in a few hundred years- wrote something about your life the way people now write things about average people in history, maybe that is what they would say, if they knew. But they wouldn’t know. And maybe, you think, you won’t ask the universe of any more second chances, but maybe somewhere along the way you can make some of your own, and find out what else home can feel like.

_

A few days after you get back home, you take some of the money you had saved, put it in your boot, and go to the bus stop. The bus goes through the highway, and then the edges of town, where in the distance, you can see the Strip. You get off near where you know a tattoo place is.

You give the tattooist the cash and say, “I’ll have just a little black cat, on my ankle.” It doesn’t hurt that much. And if it did you wouldn’t really care. Your skin is red around the new black ink outline of a cat’s dark silhouette. Cute, the kind of cat you’d want to pet; also realistic, an outline that could very well be a real cat’s shadow. Looking down on it, you remember something you read a long time ago on some TV program about cats you thought was so interesting when you were a kid, when you played with all the strays and fed them little bits of leftover chicken, and your mom was so surprised because they didn’t bite you or anything even though some of them were feral, they seemed to like you. A drawing from childhood that your mom keeps in her room, a picture of you with long and wild black hair holding out a plate to cats, black and white and gray and orange. _Me + My Friends_.

Cats always land on their feet.

_

You’re back at school towards the end of summer and you don’t look at anyone in the eye, even though you can hear some people talking about you. You called the school and said you were coming back and managed to hang up before they asked too many questions. So you’re retaking Civics because you never finished it, which you suppose is fine. There are worse things the school can do to you.

The Russian boy in Civics class has dark hair and undereye circles and wears all black and kind of reminds you of you, if you were a boy from Eastern Europe. He tells you his name is Boris in between classes when he asks you if you have a light, and you tell him your name is Kerry, but soon enough he nicknames you Kotku as soon as he sees the cat tattoo on your ankle you got soon before school started. “Do you have a cat?” he asks, his voice loud, like he doesn’t notice it. “My friend and I- we have a dog, sort of.” You’re interested to hear the explanation for that, whenever he provides it.

But you tell him, no, although you’d love to have a cat one day. You chose the tattoo, you tell him, because you love cats. “They always land on their feet,” you say.

Boris hears this and nods sagely, pondering your words. “A very important skill to have,” he says.

“Yeah,” you say, leaning against the lockers. His shirt says Never Summer- not something he picked up anywhere near here, you assume. “It takes a lot of practice, but it’s pretty useful.”

He smiles crookedly, understandingly, at you, some of his teeth grey. “We should have talked sooner!” he says. “If I had met you earlier we could know each other so well by now.”

You shrug. “Well, it’s not too late for that,” you say. He raises his eyebrows approvingly. Within a few days he’ll be professing his eternal love to you, which you’ll appreciate but not really believe, but for now, you’re just happy someone at this school seems to actually _like_ you. 

_

Sometimes when you think back, you worry you’ll forget parts of your life that you’ve experienced- moments, sights and sounds, details, exchanges of words, everyday pieces of life that aren’t the large events, things that might not make it into the Hollywood cut of the movie of your life, not that one would ever exist. Forgetting is so easy, people don’t even realize they’re doing it. Remembering is something that has to be done on purpose- as long as it’s not in the case of being unable to forget. But, you’ve always thought, if you can’t forget, then you shouldn’t. Even if it wasn’t useful, even if it didn’t make you stronger or teach you a valuable lesson- if you can’t forget it, it’s supposed to stay in your mind. It belongs to you.

No matter what anyone does to you, takes from you, says you are lesser than them because you lack- you have your mind and your memory. And they can say what they like, but no one can actually do anything about that. Even if you forgot, people would still remember. And when it comes to the memories only you have, that no one else in the world can have, the ones between you and whatever in the universe is out there- if you lost them they would be gone forever and losses like that shouldn’t happen. Your own life can’t be a secret from yourself. And if everyone else is going to act like they know everything about you, then you’ll be fucked if anything about you ever becomes unknown to you.

So when an old memory comes back you don’t think it’s strange, you allow it to show itself in your mind like an old television program playing in the middle of the night when most people aren’t watching. You and your friend Tina at the mall looking through the window of a store, pointing out the belly-button rings you liked and wanted to get when one day you would be old enough to get piercings: pink rhinestone butterflies, silvery dragons with red eyes, blue Playboy bunnies, glittery Hello Kitty. Your favorite songs at the time had played on the speakers that day- hers had been “What’s My Age Again” by Blink-182 and yours had been “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child. The storefront dark with blue lights flashing, shadowing over your and Tina’s faces like fireworks.

Fireworks: when you were a young child, you watched through the window of your room, feeling like you were seeing something you weren’t meant to but not like you were breaking any rules, when some guys on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve tested their own fireworks, setting them off, the noises loud and sizzling and you were confused because you couldn’t see them and thought they must not have worked on that day that was cool, but not so cold that you had to wear a coat out.

Winter: just a few years ago, when you were fifteen. A rare snowfall, and you and your mom were there for it, and the two of you went outside to feel the cold little flakes fall on you soft as kisses, and they clung to your hair and shoulders and fell into your mouths when you let them, and your mom was wearing a vest with a fake-fur trimmed hood and you were wearing a black-and-blue plaid flannel shirt that went almost to your knees and kept you warm and you thought that those colors were how a winter night like that _felt_ , cold, but so close and intimate and powerful that it wasn’t a bad thing. Like you could be a part of that night and it would welcome you. When you feel like that- you always make sure you remember, so you can always have it. 

_

Boris’ friend, Theo, seems like he doesn’t like you. Not that most people do, but you didn't do anything to him. He seems to draw into himself when you’re around, like he’s uncomfortable, or sad. Maybe he reminds you of someone. But you think you have an idea of why he doesn’t feel like being friends.

You’ve seen it before. Your mom answering the door to some enraged woman, some guy’s wife or girlfriend. Calling her names. Asking her why. What you understood at age twelve- how old you were when you saw this one woman barge in and your mom told you to stay in your room until she took care of it- was that she was asking your mom why, but she really wanted to find the answer in herself and her man, and that would mean asking questions about their relationship. But it would be easier to blame your mom. 

Now, this isn’t the same situation. Especially because you’re all just high school kids and there isn’t any money or work involved, even if there may be some lying. But you’ve seen it. A guy thinks a girl is desirable, so that must have been an action she undertook, and she must be bad inside. Or- so some people think- “there must be something wrong with me if my man isn’t paying as much attention to me anymore. Something has changed beyond repair, or it was always a lie. He is looking her way so she must want to possess his life, consume him, let no one else in the world see him, cling to him like she wants to make him a part of her, just so he cannot be anyone else’s.” But you don’t have that power even if you wanted it. That’s what they don’t understand.

The woman had left you and your mom’s place crying angrily. She hadn’t hit or attacked your mom after all and you thought she would and maybe your mom had too and that was why she told you to go in your room, and you’d run to your mom and wrapped your arms around her and said, “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“It’s okay, Kerry,” she told you, holding you close, twirling a lock of your hair that you’d left braided overnight in hopes it would look like it had been crimped. “I wasn’t in danger.” That was another thing she taught you- how to recognize danger, and how to recognize its absence. That you should be making your own money, your own living, and never let your life be run by a man, by anyone. That if someone cares about you, you should cherish that. That nobody can ever tell you who you are but you.

You can hear Theo over the phone when you’re just with Boris sometimes. Different things, sometimes. Sad, mostly. _But where are you Boris? Why? When are you coming back? Are you mad at me or something? What did she say about me to you? Hey, Boris I know you’re probably busy but if you want to come over…_ reminds you of that song, Jolene. Except he’s asking Boris and not you, maybe because if he asks you, he’ll have to admit to what he’s feeling.

And you see them when they’re together. When you and Boris sit next to each other on the couch and Theo falls asleep in Boris’ lap or something and Boris folds over him, even as he kisses you or keeps his arm on your shoulder. When they fall asleep holding hands. Or when Boris carries Theo upstairs to his bed when he passes out, careful and slow, like they’re in some old movie. The way once when they were both drunker than you were, you were all watching _True Romance_ because you had rented it from Blockbuster and towards the end Theo turned to Boris and said “don’t ever leave me,” like it took all his energy to say it, and Boris said, like he needed to focus so hard on telling the truth he couldn’t talk too loud, “of course not, never.” All the rumors and jokes and shit people say at school and how in your experience a lot is lies but also a lot is truth presented like it’s some great evil of the world, gossiped about like some screaming neon headline on a tabloid magazine.

You are close enough to Boris to know many of the parts of his life, some secret, some not, some that people at school haven’t even guessed at. And you don’t judge him for it. Even if you don’t completely know what he’s been through in your bones the way you would have if you’ve lived it, you understand, in the same way he does with you. You try to fill in the gaps of understanding with one another, knowing that you were wounded by people who wanted you to never be able to recover or help anyone else recover. You know he does this with Theo, as well. They do it together. Theo might be delicate, but from what you’ve learned about him, you know now that he isn’t as weak as you thought he was.

One day at school, in the empty halls during a class, Boris asks you, offhandedly. “Hey, Kotku. You are not _jealous_ of Potter, no?” And your first instinct has you laughing. Which, if Theo was here, would probably make him freeze with envy, another list on his reason to hate you and only you so that he doesn’t have to be angry with Boris, but you don’t mean it like that.

“No, Boris. Don’t worry about that. Of course not,” you tell him, firmly, because sometimes he gets mad or jealous, and sometimes you fight over stupid things and you wish he didn’t get this way and you wish you knew how to be so that he wouldn’t. At least he isn’t the way Mike is. You never even really wanted to be his girlfriend but he cleaned the pool at the motel and would never leave you alone so you just went along with what he wanted because he wouldn’t accept no. He would always say, as if it was funny, he was glad you didn’t have any friends to keep you away from him. You hope, now that he’s states away, he’ll forget about you. Being left alone is sometimes the greatest comfort someone can give, depending on what kind of person they are.

You’re not jealous. But sometimes you wonder what it would be like, to have someone you’re that close to. To have something that people like you, them included, tend to give up on hoping for, must be overwhelming, it must be so hard to even make sense of.

_

People like you aren’t supposed to ever want anything. Or plan for anything, or aspire to anything. Sure, everyone says people like you _should_ do this or that, but what they really mean is, _you should have done that all along. You should have never been the way you are in the first place._ Fuck that.

You want a place of your own one day, doesn’t even have to be big, and you want your mom to have a place of her own too. And you can visit each other. You don’t ever want either of you to have to worry about money. You want a cat, a Siamese who meows a lot and wears a studded collar, you want to live the kind of life where you can take care of an animal and give that animal a good life. You want a keyboard and to learn how to play music and maybe do it just for fun, even if you can’t make a career out of it, you want to actually enjoy things. Sometimes you think you should stop doing drugs. You can’t always put your finger on what you want. It’s only ever supposed to be a fantasy. It’s never supposed to come true. But still. You don’t think you’d ask of the world anything outlandish or unrealistic, and not right this second. It’s not like you’re writing “unicorn” on a Christmas list. But soon, you hope it all happens. You don’t want to wait your whole life. People say that what you want is often not what you need. But maybe it can be both. 

Sometimes you want to hurt everyone who ever hurt you, you want to make them understand what they did, and you want them to never do it to anyone again and you want to know how many of them did it to other people or if it was just you and why. But you also want to be able to live the kind of life where you don’t spend so much time thinking about being hurt. Of course, it will happen, no matter what. Everyone gets hurt, even people who don’t have many problems, it’s just part of life and you expect it, you can take it, you live with it, there isn’t any other option. But you don’t want to have to feel the hurt as much, the way it can take over you and come out like a dragon’s breath, or twist you and make you hide inside yourself and go into robot-mode, the state of _I’ll do what you want I’ll make you happy, please._

You want this to all be a memory one day. It wouldn’t be such a bad one, maybe, when you put it all together. Maybe one day when you’re grown and somehow different, you can look back, like someone looking at their town from a hot air balloon, and see yourself as so far above it, seeing it all so clearly, with a kind of affection- _from this angle, it all seems so small._

_

When you lie on your back on the floor, after a while, looking at the popcorn ceiling is almost like looking at constellations. (Which you can also do, because you’re deep into the desert and highway and far enough from the city to be able to see the stars at night, arrayed on top of you like you’re in a snow globe, the sort of elaborate gift snow globes sold for high prices at Christmas.) So there you are, you and Boris, flat on the floor, your feet pointing in opposite directions, your heads next to each other, occasionally propping yourselves up to drink a beer or have some of the M&M’s from the vending machine. You’re listening to one of the mixtapes you made him, playing on your CD player ( _I never meant to hurt you, I never meant to make you cry but tonight I’m cleanin’ out my closet…_ ). He has one at his own house, but he always tells you he worries too much about you to bring you there.

His father. You’re not sure if he thinks his father would hurt you or not, but then, if he gets as fucked up as Boris says he does when he drinks, he might not even know what he’s doing as he does it. It’s one thing to lose control of yourself- something you worry about a lot- it’s quite another to not have any control in the first place. Something like terror briefly seizes you- not of Boris’ father but of what he’s become, and you hope Boris never ends up that way and you don’t think you’ll ever end up that way but thinking about living in that state is almost unspeakably horrific. Just doing anything, no regard for anyone including yourself, doing all kinds of harm you don’t remember. Like you’re possessed. That’s not how Boris had put it, but it was what you thought of. “There are some things I would not want you to have to see, Kotku.” Boris had said to you when he explained it. You understand. But, after all you’ve told him about your own life, it’s almost naïve, you think, his way of laying it down to you. You’ve seen a lot of things you probably shouldn’t have had to. He wants to protect you. But he can’t. Maybe it’s because he’s never been able to protect himself enough. Sometimes you even entertain wishing you could protect him- from himself and from his father; from Mike, who’d surely hurt him if he ever met him, no matter how tough Boris thinks he is; from the dark corners of this state you can tell he’s poking his head in, but you’ve seen, and you know.

Sometimes when people say they want to protect someone what they really mean is that they want to save them, and you can’t save someone from what already happened. You know you can’t save Boris, even if he listened to you more. Only he can do that. And you hope he does, even if it’s just for his own sake. And sometimes you want to tell him- _Hey, Boris, it’s okay. I know you care, in your own way. Because we’re a lot alike. That’s why we’re so close. But … you don’t have to worry about protecting me from the world. The world already happened to me. All we can really do is just listen to each other and help one another. If you beat up a guy for checking me out that’s not going to undo anything that ever happened to me and if I swear to you a hundred times I’m going to love you forever that won’t erase all the love you’ve lost or have been hurt by because I know how it is when people use the word love like a weapon._ Sometimes you want to say _you don’t have to prove anything with me._ Because that’s what it feels like and you can’t tell who he’s trying to prove it to or what he’s trying to prove in the first place. But you never say any of that. You have a feeling you won’t. Some things people learn on their own better than if they’re told.

The next track starts playing. Boris turns, as if he’s in bed, his head shifting towards you, his hair falling over your face as he leans over you and starts kissing you, pressing his mouth down. You can feel the thick carpet on the back of your neck, some wispy strands of your hair trapped in between. He tells you in Russian that he loves you in between kisses.

You don’t think he is in love with you, and not just because you don’t think anyone ever has been or will be. But you can feel that he cares about you and you care about him back, and that’s the kind of bond that can be sensed. That’s better than being in love. That’s rare, for people like you- to have that and to be able to share that with each other. The understanding, the belonging. These are things you keep to yourself, because sometimes it’s just better to. But inside you, you know. And you kiss him back, beneath the part of the ceiling that you pointed out to him (“I think this one looks like the Scorpio constellation,” you said, and he said it looked to him like a flower, and started talking about how Theo’s dad and his dad's girlfriend are experts in astrology). He always tells you how small you are and how it worries him, but it’s just that you forget to eat and get used to it, and he’s so small too, you’re not sure if you’ve ever seen a boy as small as you are. He tastes like beer and chocolate and cigarettes, his mouth greenish blue with the melted M&M shell stains that he didn’t bother to clean off, like he was in the pool for too long on a cold day. You did his nails, a deep black, but the black and red surrounding his large eyes (so wide and dark like those Big Eyes pictures your mom has a magnet of on the radiator) isn’t makeup. You know you can’t protect him but you can hold him, just for a little while, and ignore everything else in your lives. The both of you are right, right now. No one can take it from either of you. And that’s a victory- a small one, but a meaningful one. One to know the value of, one to be satisfied with. You do, and you are.

_

In Civics class the teacher goes over that _American Progress_ painting they’ve already showed you every year since seventh grade, the Manifest Destiny one. The blonde lady floating over the West, wearing some kind of cloth that’s almost falling off of her because the guy who painted it wanted an excuse to put tits in his art you guess, stringing along a telegraph wire while the settlers move forward from the daylight and chase the native people into the darkness. How the West as we know it was created, the foundations of this state and city we have now, the teacher says. Pretty much a similar speech to what most of the other teachers have said.

“Does anyone have anything to say about this painting? What do you think it is saying about the West as a concept? How can this tie into present day history of our country?” the teacher pauses and looks directly at Theo, who some of the other students have already began staring at. “You’ve been very quiet, Theo, I’m sure you have something to contribute?”

Theo looks up, nervousness in his eyes. “No. I- I don’t know,” he says, and you can barely hear him. Before anyone can keep bothering him, you speak. The fucked up thing with this school is that even the adults go after people who can’t stand up for themselves. At least you only fight people who fight you first, or who you know are willing and able to.

“Actually,” you say without raising your hand. “I have something.” The teacher looks startled. You don’t always participate, and he knows you, all the teachers know you as trouble.

“All right,” he says, uncertainly.

“Well,” you start. “The thing about this painting is that it’s supposed to be beautiful. The guy that painted it made this and we were all supposed to look at it and say, yeah, isn’t that great. But it’s obviously not. I mean, look at it,” you say, wondering if anyone is paying attention to you, but then again, maybe they are. _That crazy skank with the Halloween hair in my Civics class started yelling all this weird political shit, like if you really want to, then move to another country, we won’t stop you!_ “The people who lived there are getting forced out and we all know what really happened next. It’s awful. The flying lady is supposed to be some kind of angel but she’s just watching over all this evil like she’s happy about it. And that’s maybe one of the most… screwed up things about it, is that it’s being drawn as this amazing thing.” Everyone is quiet for a moment.

“Well. Miss Hutchins. That’s a very interesting perspective,” the teacher says, looking stunned, like you yelled at him or threw down the flag by the door and the picture of Bush on the wall.

You shrug. “Just saying what I thought.” You look down at your textbook quietly and crack your knuckles.

“All right, then. Back to the lesson. Can anyone tell me what the etymology of _Las Vegas_ is?” he asks, his voice now back to normal, as if you never said anything.

_

The last time you liked school was when you were twelve. You weren’t the greatest student, but you were all right. You and Tina spent every moment you could together in school and then hung out afterwards, even doing (or procrastinating on) homework together.

If it’s a good memory, it should feel good. But maybe the loss of all that is what makes these memories feel sad most of the time. Once you were happier, if not completely happy. Once you understood a lot for your age, but feel older inside than you should have been. It’s not like you wish you could have been a kid forever. No one can do that unless they die, and for now, you’re going to live. But sometimes you wish you felt like you had real proof, a real reason to think you have something good ahead of you.

_

_Once there was a girl from the vast desert expanse that lay just outside the city that may not have been the greatest, but was the ultimate city of the era, of the country. It was vice and profit and winning and losing and dying and beauty and garishness and travel and love and hate and sex and freedom and stagnation and nostalgia and innovation and conquest and leisure. It was all that was good and bad in the country, together, and the city did not seem to be invested in which would win. But the girl was concerned about it. She had seen desolation and suffering and harm and ill intent, both in the stark sun-blaze of the desert roadside and the neon-lit night of the crowded city. She would have liked to live a life where no one harmed her, but so much of life from what she knew seemed to be about getting through harm as best as possible. She had learned there was not much point in wanting, but she still did sometimes. She would think, as if asking illicit wishes from some supernatural power- I want to not be afraid when someone says my name to me. I want something to do with this rage before it just turns to misery and I lose myself in it. I want to one day be able to take comfort in my life, the way I once did as a child long ago. I don’t need to be rich or fall in love or be beautiful. Just have an idea of what every day will hold, and to be able to find solace in it._

How the story would go. A fairy tale of a girl who would not belong in any storybook, a horror story without an ending, a Western about the ghost town that exists right alongside the city and the ghosts who inhabit it. A diary entry never meant to be read. A textbook chapter not for the future, but for the past, so that if students a hundred and fifty years ago read it while watching the American Progress around them, they would know that sometimes when a city, any city really, is built by sinful means than a Sin City it just might become.

_

One day after school you and Boris go to hang out at Theo’s house because no one is going to be there. His dad is off, as Boris explains, doing some probably illegal things in the city for work and his dad’s girlfriend is at a bar on the Strip working. Today, apparently, they’re going to be out of their house for even longer than usual because they’re having a “date night” after work. Theo’s house feels strange to you. Not because it’s big, so much as it feels so empty. Like being in a big hotel that has been closed for the off-season, just waiting for the tourists to come back. You gather that Theo has a big house that he shares with this remaining family of his but he doesn’t have money, not real money, not lasting or consistent money, and certainly none of his own. Which is in a way, possibly, a result of his living in the middle of nowhere, just as Boris lives in this near-abandoned neighborhood. (In the original Rapunzel story, you remember, she was kicked out of her tower prison, left on her own in the desert. No one was ever supposed to find her.)

You’ve made your peace with where you are, at the side of the road, right where everyone is, right outside of the city. Close enough to see it. You know you can’t be there forever- you don’t think anyone can ever be in one place together, you’re not sure if it’s possible. And it’s never possible for Boris, so maybe that’s why he seems, comparatively, so at ease in this ghost town he lives in. You could get murdered here and no one would ever know, you think. The perfect place for a meth lab or something. Sometimes when you’re in this place, all alone except for the guys it’s like the three of you are ghosts, or maybe like everyone else is dead, and you’re aliens from another planet, come to observe an Earth that destroyed itself. It seems like this may as well be another planet for Theo. Maybe the Strip or the R&R would feel that way to him too. He’s not comfortable in his own skin and he shows it and some nights he’ll even say as much, to Boris without trying to hide it from you, even if he doesn’t say it directly to you. At first, when you first met him and he seemed like he’d already decided to dislike you (even kids at this school who are targets of shitty rumors aren’t above looking down on other kids who are targets of shitty rumors, you suppose), you weren’t sure about what his deal was and you didn’t know what he’d been through. But now you know more about him, through Boris and sometimes through Theo’s own confessions you’re not sure if he remembers.

You aren’t jealous of him. Being jealous doesn’t do anyone any good and besides, what he has with Boris is different than what you and Boris have. That’s just how it is. You don’t want his vacant house. Being out in the middle of nowhere isn’t any safer than being in a crowd. You don’t want to be able to forget the way he does. That just makes all the pain build up somewhere and one day it will all crash down at once. And you feel bad for him, because one day it will happen. You can’t really be jealous of someone you feel bad for.

Sometime during the night- it’s a cold evening, too cold for the pool- Boris decided to go take a shower in the master bathroom, which has one of those fancy glass-door showers and a ton of different body lotions. There’s no running water at his house because his dad never pays the bills even though it’s not like he isn’t making any money. So it’s just you and Theo in the living room while the TV plays some black-and-white movie. Theo goes between staring blankly at it and looking at the floor. Over the blaring orchestra soundtrack of the old movie, you can hear Theo crying, rocking himself back and forth on the couch. You’re on opposite ends of it. You should probably say something. Boris will come down soon and know what to do.

“You know,” you lean over a little, putting your hand on his elbow. “When it was really, really bad at home or when I had to run away. Sometimes I would just cry. And I would tell myself it was good to cry alone because I had this one thing to myself. But sometimes if you have someone who cares about you, it’s not so bad to share with them. I know you probably don’t want to talk to me about it, but Boris really loves you, you’re his best friend. Whatever it is, he’d want you to tell him.”

“I’m sorry,” Theo says, sounding strangled. You have a strange feeling that he’s not apologizing for crying. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I don’t mean…” He looks up at you slowly, his eyes bloodshot and his wet, dark face frightened and despondent. “I know it’s not really your fault. That I’m just jealous of you. Because he doesn’t love me.” These sentences seem to take hours each, as if every word involves coughing up pieces of glass.

You’re only surprised that he said this to you. The lack of surprise on your face and the fact that you aren’t asking him what he means seems to hurt him and he curls up on the couch like he’s sick, inhaling deeply and trying not to cry more. How much pain he must be in- to envy you, of all people. “He does,” you say. You’re certain, now that you think about it. A part of you wonders if Theo only doesn’t realize this because he doesn’t think anyone could love him. In a way he reminds you of yourself, at least the way you once were. You don’t say this. Anything you say he’ll probably have forgotten by tomorrow, even if the fact of its happening stays inside of him. What that must be like. To feel, and not remember where it all came from. “And don’t be jealous of me,” you tell him, trying to be gentle. “Really. Don’t. Guys who aren’t Boris, they don’t even actually like me. They hate me. Just because someone thinks you’re hot doesn’t mean anything. Someone can think you’re hot and not give a shit whether or not you die in a fire.”

You really hope some part of him remembers this. One day he’s going to grow up and no one is going to be around to tell him that you shouldn’t be jealous of what someone has if they’re suffering the same shit you are, no one’s going to tell him that someone wanting to do you sometimes means they just want control and possession and sometimes they don’t care if they hurt you and sometimes they want to hurt you. Maybe Theo thinks no guy has ever looked at him before as someone to be cared for, because most of them call him names and write his name on the bathroom wall and make jokes about him and Boris, just as they do about you. Dumbfucks. If the people doing it weren’t guys (though, come to think of it, some of the girls do it too) you would have fought them, the way you’ll fight any girl because you’re not afraid of any of them and you can take any one of them even if you don’t win, and you usually do. Well, most guys don’t care about you either, and wanting to screw you never stopped them from asking how much it would be to fuck your mom or if you could get them a discount, or if you have diseases, or if they can watch you and their girlfriends do it because you’re into chicks after all, or if it’s true that sometimes, scientifically like in biology, girls actually _love_ it when guys force it on them.

“Boris cares about you,” you say, because you realize what you just said isn’t exactly inspiring. “And…you have to care about yourself.” He looks at you, almost confused, his eyes wide and glimmering, his nose running as he sniffs and wipes his face with his sleeve, Boris’ oversized shirt. “He’d want you to, you know,” you continue. “You have to fight. I’ve been there.”

Theo sniffs again, a small, sad noise coming from his throat. “I don’t want to anymore,” he breathes desperately, uneasily.

You nod, looking right at him. “I know,” you say. “But you have to.” It’s never a question of whether or not you can’t. You just do it because you have to. If the world has to force you into doing things and going through things, you can learn how to survive, how to get through it all. The world doesn’t get to break you and neither does anyone in it.

He puts his face in his knees and wraps his arms around himself, crying wordlessly, and after a moment you move closer to him on the couch and put your arms around him. “You’re gonna get through it,” you tell him, though you’re not sure if he can hear you, “you know you can.” You don’t tell him it will be okay. He wouldn’t believe it, and you’re not sure if you do either, because that’s not really how it works. Probably it won’t all be okay forever- but, more likely, sometimes it will be. 

Boris comes down, his hair wet and dripping on the floor. “Hey,” you tell him softly, “he doesn’t feel good…” you bite your lip, knowing Boris will know what to do. He always does. And he speeds up his pace and almost runs to where the two of you are. You move aside. Maybe one day, you think, when you look back on this it will seem so far away. It probably won’t. But maybe one day all three of your lives can be so far away from this.

_

Sometimes you dream of the mountain lion you saw when you were a kid. At the side of the highway, across the street from your window. You were looking out your window one morning when you woke up really early the way young kids sometimes do, watching the sunrise spread over the horizon, like a watercolor fire, like a lava lamp spilling from the sky. And there he was, still, as if he was waiting for something. He turned his head and you looked in his eyes, and when you were a kid you were sure he looked back. Maybe he didn’t. But maybe he did see the glint of your eyes through the glass across the road, just as you saw his. And then, he crossed the road, the road that was so empty that day, and you can’t remember why. Maybe there had been a car accident, or a road blockage. But you saw him walk closer and closer, and you wanted to touch him, to run with him. And he leaped forward and you lost track of where he went but you never forgot what you saw that quiet, red morning.

You dream that you’re running, but you see the mountain lion, and he runs with you, so at least you’re not alone. You don’t look back, just to your side, where he is. And after a while, the mountain lion directs you somewhere off road into the desert. And you don’t have to run away anymore. You rest for a minute, the two of you. And then you run again. Not away from anything, not to anything. Just to go and see everywhere you can, at least in this area of the desert. And the two of you can stop whenever you like, but no one is going to make you stop. 

_

Maybe you shouldn’t have forgiven Boris for hitting you but you do anyway. You thought, at first, he’s out of his mind. But when you thought about it you remembered that even though the two of you argue and disagree, he at least considers you worth reasoning with, someone he wants to work things through with.

It wasn’t like that with Bradley. He’d always just tell you to _shut your fucking mouth, be quiet, I’ll call the cops on your mother, Shannon should wake up and see her daughter’s a lying little bitch_. You knew he hated you, and you never felt that he actually loved or cared about your mother because you never saw any evidence. He was happy to take what she would give, whether it was dinner or day trips or affection, and acted as though he expected it from her as a minimum even when it was a real hard thing for her to manage. He hated you because he knew you could tell. He hated you because you knew your mother was better than him. Because in his mind, since you weren’t fooled by him, you thought you were better than he was and needed to be corrected.

Boris was the first person you told after your mom. About Bradley and everything after. And he held no judgment toward you and said you were brave and strong and smart and would live a great life one day and everyone who ever hurt you would regret it. You knew they wouldn’t regret it, most of them probably wouldn’t even remember doing it in the first place. But the fact that he would even think to say that…part of it was that you think he believes in a better world than you do and part of it was that no one saw you the way he saw you. As someone from the same world.

Maybe it frightens him, that you’re so similar to him. Or that on some level he has to realize you see that he is in love with someone and it isn’t you. Maybe it frightens him that all the ways he’s been hurt live inside of him and reenacting it sometimes feels like the only way to get it out.

_Fuck you, cooze,_ that was what Bradley would call you when he was drunk. You found yourself whispering that into Carla from English class’ face when you were winning a fight with her after you heard her call you the biggest whore in Vegas. She kept screaming at you to stop, you won, but it barely registered. _You’re a whore and your mother’s a whore and that’s all either of you are ever going to be and no one will ever care about either of you and you should be thankful I’m staying here and don’t you dare pretend like you didn’t want it you don’t give a shit what anyone does to you because deep down you know you’re nothing and nothing anyone does to you makes any difference,_ Bradley’s memory whispered to you. In all the memories he was on top of you and this time you pretended you were on top and you were going to beat the memory to death right to Hell, and you didn’t even care about Carla one way or the other.

That’s a little different. The question was never about whether or not you’d become Bradley, the way you wonder if Boris ever asks himself whether or not he’s becoming like his father (not that you think he will be- his father is a serial killer, and you don’t think Boris could ever be like that, no matter how lost he is). The issue surrounding you is more regarding whether or not Bradley was right about you.

And so you and Boris journey into the desert on acid and enter a new dimension together. Because he doesn’t think Bradley or anyone is right about you, and you don’t think he’s his father. You’re your own people. Even if it’s hard to figure out what that means, you know it. The sky changes colors and there is no time, you are not living in 2006 or any year at all, there is only the desert as vibrant and eternal as dreams.

You hear the sand, like ocean waves, as the two of you walk through it, both your shoes left behind long ago. “Where are we?” asks Boris. You hear his voice far away, like he’s speaking from another room, even though he’s next to you.

You start laughing and then you can feel warm crystals of water, like raindrops in Heaven, form in your eyes. It’s beautiful, the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen, and you love it so much. “Home,” you say, not because you’re near the motel but because this place, this desert right outside the city, is the only thing you’ve ever relied on. Your voice comes out as a roar or maybe you hear it, the mountain lion, or maybe it’s inside you. Telling you from the future that you will always have here, but you are a wildcat and one day you are going to be free.

Boris is laughing too. You are hand in hand as you start running, you’re not sure where, but you tell him, “let’s keep going, no one can stop us,” and he’s yelling something that sounds celebratory in Russian. The universe, whoever is out there, can see you. You’ve never been alone, you were supposed to survive even if the world said otherwise. What do people in this world know of what goes beyond it?

No one is ever going to stop you again, you think with a clarity that almost startles you and you nearly stop dead in your tracks. Not if they can help it. You find yourself jumping in the air and spinning around and screaming, not in pain or anger but in liberated joy. The black and orange of your hair is all you can see for a moment as it whorls around your head.

“I fucking love you, Kotku,” Boris shouts, “you are me, in another life.” There it is, you think. The outline of the moon is visible in the blue sky and you howl at it and somehow manage to pick Boris up in your arms and he does the same to you. You feel like you can reach the sky, like you can climb into the air and transcend the world that is and reach the one that should be.

The next day, there’s some left over. You tell Boris that he should try doing some with Theo.

What you don’t say is that you think you realized- maybe not today or tomorrow, but sometime soon- you want to eventually stop doing drugs, for real and for good.

_

“Hey,” you say one October night, lying down on the carpet in Theo’s dad’s house. Boris and Theo are lying down next to each other, Boris between the two of you. The carpet is soft under your head, in a firm way, like one of those special mattresses they have at the mall and the employees invite you to feel, as if you’re going to buy a mattress right then and there. “If you could go anywhere in the world where would you go?”

“Hm,” Boris says, almost immediately. “Papua New Guinea. Was the greatest place I ever lived.” He takes a smoke from his cigarette, the smoke drifting up toward the shining ceiling. “But I have never gone back to places I have lived,” he says, his voice more seriousness. “I have never done that in my life.” You all know Boris’ father has been meaning to move away from Vegas, leave the country for Australia again, and Boris doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to follow his father again in his life. But none of you mention it.

There’s a quiet moment. The low sound of your mixtape in the CD player playing its first song for the second time ( _For months I wanted to cry, felt like I wanted to die, kept asking God why_ , _do I deserve this?_ ) Boris smoking, Theo breathing like he’s trying to calm himself down. “Kansas,” he says so quietly he sounds like the TV, not muted but almost, on one of the lowest volume settings. Boris turns his head to look toward Theo for explanation, or just for elaboration- he seems almost surprised. Maybe he doesn’t want to go back to New York after what happened. Maybe he fears it or hates it or he used to see it as a good place but now can’t separate the good from the bad and can’t face it that way. You don’t know. Maybe he’s still figuring it out. You didn’t ask about living anywhere, just going there. “My mom was from there. And her family.” He sounds so wistful, both like an old person looking back at the past and like the vulnerable kid he is. “They took her home away from her,” he says. “She lost her home too. But I want to find it again. No matter what they did to her. I didn’t forget her. I won’t,” he says, his voice breaking. He sounds like he’s trying to make himself stop, compose himself, and you wonder if he’d even try if you weren’t there, if he’d let himself be open if not for you. You understand. It’s hard to open up to people when you’ve been ripped open against your will.

“You should go,” you say encouragingly. If he remembers it tomorrow you wonder if he’ll think you were telling him to get out of town. Theo doesn’t really answer or continue, just sniffs a little and says, yeah. You look to your side and Boris is holding his hand, stroking his fingers consolingly with his thumb.

(“Hey Boris…” you once heard Theo say with his eyes still closed as he spoke between one dream and another on the floor of your room when you were all hanging out there and he passed out because he hadn’t slept in a couple days even though Boris was blasting the popular radio station that played that _we all just wanna be big rock stars_ song which come to think of it probably was what woke up Theo, “am I alive?”)

“What about you, Kotku?” Boris asks, moving his head to the side in a jerking motion. “You must have some amazing ideas! You know all about this fucking country.” His eyes are wide with excitement and intoxication.

You half-smile to yourself, looking at the ceiling again, so high upwards that even if you were standing up it would still be so high. “I don’t exactly know,” you say, for the first time, out loud. “I think I would just start going, and see where I end up, see what I find. And then keep going.” And then, maybe, come back. Or find a new home. You’re not quite sure yet. But you think, soon enough. You’ll have to figure out it.

“Wow,” says Theo vacantly. Maybe not to you, but to himself, in response to you, judging by how quiet he is again.

“That is so profound,” Boris says, enunciating the last word, turning to look at you. You think about that. If the concept is profound, then maybe it’s not exactly realistic for you. But you still _feel_ it, not just want it- to see what there is. To find somewhere, eventually, even if it’s not far from here after all. Somewhere you can belong without _belong_ meaning being sentenced to hurt. Maybe that’s what all of you are reaching for. And it’s as far away from your touch as this pricy ceiling, sure, but it’s there, and it exists. You close your eyes for a moment and imagine what it must be like, to reach into the sky. To find the world that should be.

_

On your free period you’re sitting on one of the rails on the ramp outside the school, your headphones in your ear, enjoying the solitude. If you turn the volume up loud enough the school may as well not be there. It is, of course. But sometimes it’s good to take a break. You button your worn denim jacket up to the last button because it’s getting colder, at least, for around here. But you don’t really mind. Home wouldn’t be what it was, if it was any different from how it always is, and sometimes that’s not a problem.

You could get lost in your train of thought, but you get distracted. “I knew I would find you here,” you can hear Boris’ muffled voice saying at the same time. He’s carrying a textbook, covertly under his arm like he’s stolen it. Even though you can see his name written in block letters on the spine, which he’s not supposed to do because you’re all supposed to give them back at the end of the year. It’s the Civics textbook, the one with the happy kids from all around the world all together on the front. The one that Theo looked at and said sarcastically, “because the world is really like that.” And you wanted to tell him, yeah little bro, you can sure as fuck say that again, because you agree, the world isn’t fair, and it’s not fair that some textbook company draws a little cartoon of some kid that’s supposed to look like him (in the minds of people creating and distributing the textbooks, reassuring themselves that they must have good intentions so they must have good beliefs so they must be doing the right thing) smiling in front of the world next to other blank-eyed smiling cartoon kids from various cultures like Stepford robots saying _we are so happy, really, everything is as it should be, everything in the world is all right._ When it’s never been.

(“Dude, no way, I thought they all died,” some dumbass said in Civics class to Theo when you all had to talk about your cultural heritage. All the teacher did was tell Theo to go ahead and present already like he was the one who had did something wrong. You talked about your both deceased Irish great-grandparents who immigrated during the 50s from County Kerry which is what your mom named you for, and Boris did a great job talking about Ukraine and Poland’s history and Theo was clearly suffering through having to present his project about his Cherokee heritage to the class.)

You pause your CD player and slide your headphones around your neck. “Hey, Boris,” you say. “What’s up?” He looks around like he’s checking to see if anyone’s watching. Since he hasn’t distanced himself from you when you’re at school, you think he’s going to tell you something secret.

“I was, ah, just wondering if you could help me with something- No big deal! Do not look worried,” he puts up a hand, smiling crookedly, mischievously. “Just something in the Wood Shop classroom. No big deal, really.”

“You need help making something?” you ask. He’s told you you’re so reliable, like a stone, and you wonder if he wants your supervision trying out some new project on one of the machines, on some whim. You wonder if his father broke a piece of furniture in his house and he’s trying to make something new, but you don’t ask this.

“Sort of,” Boris says, shrugging, as the two of you walk into the school, his feet audibly dragging on the linoleum floor. You scratch the corner of your eye, where some eyeliner has crusted in the corner. The both of you have been hit with mid-afternoon tiredness that hits when there’s nothing to do but stay at school because you can’t go anywhere else. “Just an idea I had.” There’s something he’s not saying, but maybe he will in time. There’s a quiet moment. “I’m glad we talked, very glad,” he says, more seriously. “The other day. It was very special and I will never in my life forget it. And I am so sorry, Kotku. I am.”

You nod your head. “I know,” you say, keeping yourself under control. “I’m glad too. That was…” you look back, to that recent day. “It can’t even be described in words.”

You’re quiet by the time you get to the Wood Shop class which is empty except for a few kids doing some kind of extra credit project. Boris walks past them and goes to a table, and you give them a passing glance, wondering if they’re listening to the two of you. You recognize a couple of them and hope they don’t give you any trouble. Your black, chipped nails contrast against the light brown of the sawdust-covered table. For once it’s a good thing you bite your nails so much because whatever you’re going to do next would have probably given you a ton of hangnails, otherwise.

Boris lays the textbook on the table like an artist putting forth his final work. “What are we doing with that?” you ask. You wonder what would happen if the school took enough notice in him to ask him to pay the fine for a damaged or missing textbook- then again, they might take notice only for that.

“Well,” Boris begins. “I thought we would wrap it up, you know, like a package. In many layers, strong tape, newspapers, all around it protecting it, like a shell.” At first you wonder if he means it as some kind of joke but he seems so serious and so intent on completing this project that you realize he actually means to do it.

It’s not so hard, even if you wondered at first if it would be a case of too many hands in the kitchen or whatever that expression is. You go into a steady routine, the two of you. Wrapping, taping, keeping the layers firm and smooth, not so tight as to constrict and not so loose as to be like a sack. So that only something sharp, like really big scissors or a knife or a letter opener, could open it, not the kind of thing where you stick a pencil in it and can rip it to shreds.

“Is this some kind of time capsule thing?” you ask, wondering if it’s an assignment, then thinking, if it was he would have said so, and if it was for school he may not even have bothered. Although you’d have to appreciate the irony in completing a school assignment by rendering your textbook unreachable except by extreme effort. There could be some kind of metaphoric statement in that. Not such a bad idea, now that you think of it, even though this year even if you’re not getting good grades you really do want to pass and do as well as you can so you can graduate.

Boris is quiet for a moment. “This? Ah…something like that,” he says.

“Is Theo doing one too?” you ask, and Boris’ posture stiffens up. You don’t think they’d have had a fight or else he would have told you, just this morning he was ranting to you all about how he and Theo stole dog treats from the pet store in the mall for their dog, like it was the heist of the century.

“Kotku,” Boris says, startled but faraway, “I think I have to go now. I will see you later,” he says, speed walking out the door so quickly he almost knocks one of those other kids out of their chair, but doesn’t even seem to notice as he takes his packaged textbook out.

“The fuck are you lookin at?” you ask the guy, who stares at you in annoyance, as if you and Boris shoved him to the ground on purpose, then you walk out of the room, and put your headphones back on.

_

One winter, when you were just a kid, it snowed. Just an inch, but it was more than you could ever remember seeing. You and Tina were having a sleepover and woke up to it in disbelieving wonder, as if glitter was falling from the sky. The two of you put on your sneakers, still in your pajamas- hers blue and printed with clouds, yours zebra print- and ran outside, watching the snow float down, so slowly, like the smallest imaginable crystals. Soft, glittering shards of ice thickening in the air as more and more of them came, flowing, less intense than rain, and much slower. You watched your feet make small prints in the thin layer of snow in the parking lot, but you tried to step within your steps, to keep the snow pure, even as razor-thin layers of snow, maybe not even centimeters’ worth, fell in the grooves your feet made.

“In Colorado,” Tina said, as she often began many sentences, because she’d spent a lot of her childhood there, after she lived in Florida, and until her parents got divorced and she and her dad moved down here, “it snows so much. So much you can make snowmen and do snow angels.” You’ve seen those on TV, people lying down in the snow and waving their arms and legs and making a shape vaguely like someone with wings and a dress like bell-bottoms sewn together. Tina had been to Florida and Colorado and Vegas and not many other places aside from that, but in your mind then, it was as if she’d seen the world. Not in the way that you can be worldly without leaving a city, as you grew to know. But that she’d seen so many different things, she had belonged to different places and thus wasn’t beholden to anywhere. 

“You could probably make sand angels if you went out to the desert,” you said. There wasn’t enough snow to do angels, and even if you tried it would just get rid of all the snow where you lay down, it would destroy it. You thought then, with a suddenness and briefness: if something is this rare and special, nothing should be done to it, it should be left as it is, to protect it. “Do you know if you’re ever going back there?” you asked then.

Tina shrugged. There were goosebumps on her wrists from the cold, even in her flannel pajamas. Neither of you could ever remember your gloves. Sometimes you would share a pair, one of you wearing one glove and one of you wearing the other. If no one remembered you’d hold hands or keep them in your pockets, when it got cold. But Tina would always reassure you, here, it would never get cold enough to be dangerous. But here, it’s hot enough to be dangerous, you said. And she said, I guess everywhere is dangerous in a different way. When you thought about that it made sense. It made the world seem more exciting and maybe good – if nowhere was _really_ safe, then that meant it could all be worked with. It could be overcome.

“I don’t really know. I don’t ask my dad about it,” she said. Her dad had grown up around Vegas, and wanted to come back here to live. He was sick, and you had a feeling that it was going to get a lot worse. Tina hadn’t told you in so many words yet, but you were at the point where you were beginning to wonder if Tina had moved here to live, but her dad had lived here to die – in peace, in a place he loved, something like that. “Maybe one day when I grow up I’ll live there. But I kind of like New York, too. I’ve never been but one day I _really_ want to, it seems like the coolest place ever. I can see you living there too. Where do you want to live when you’re grown up?”

You realized, crystalline flakes of snow melting on your face and evaporating icily, that you’d never thought of it before. Sometimes you think before Tina, you never paid any mind to the existence of the world outside Clark County. Eventually, you know, you would have. But this was how it happened.

You didn’t really answer her question. You said, “I want to live in a place where I can have pets and go to see concerts all the time. I don’t want a really big place like a mansion or anything but something near cool places. And we should live close together.”

When the cancer killed her father, they put her in foster care and took her far away and you never saw each other again. Sometimes you still miss her. You think about her a lot and hope she’s okay. You hope one day you could find her or she could find you. She was your first friend, and your last friend, really, until Boris.

When you’re a kid you think you can spend the rest of your life with your friends, and you forget that you’re kids and you don’t control your own lives. By the time you become adults, your life may have been pushed so far off track from what you imagined that you don’t know how to get back to where you wanted to be. Sometimes by the time you grow up you forget there’s no rule against wanting something for yourself, no rules that can reach inside your mind.

The winter is almost here. It’s November, and by this time next year, high school will be a memory, and you really will be grown up.

The other day Boris’ English teacher told the two of you, _be careful, kids_ because she heard you talking about taking a late night bus. It surprised you so much that at first you didn’t realize she was talking to you. It’s been years since anyone called you a kid.

Winter brings surprises. Snow, once. Last year, your realization that you had to run away. You wonder what it will be this year. If there will be anything at all.

On your bedroom wall, taped on your wall with all your pictures, you have a picture of that day with Tina. Your mom took it with a Polaroid. The small square shows you and Tina in the glittering light of the snow, the flakes barely visible in the slightly blurry picture, and both of your eyes shine slightly. It almost looks like a picture taken in another world. But you can see the numbers on the doors behind the two of you, barely visible but still there. Proof it really happened. A memory you can see and touch. A piece of your memory you could even take with you, take anywhere.

_

The day after you end up calling Theo’s house to tell him you’re sorry about his father’s death, and you get it because it was similar to what happened to yours- you never really were that close and he died in a drunken crash- and you thought he sounded like he really got you, and you wished relationships didn’t fuck things up the way they did because you think you would have been friends, Boris seems to vanish.

The day after he comes back and he’s so out of it you wonder if he’s seriously ill or took something he couldn’t handle but instead he just cries in your arms for hours. For so long you think he has to run out of water or he’ll get sick if he keeps going. But after a while it just stops and he’s collapsed in your arms like his limbs are made of lead and too heavy to move, like he’s asleep.

You don’t ask if he’s okay. He obviously isn’t. “I’m sorry,” you tell him, “I’m so sorry, Boris.” You think you can hear him say something, but you can barely make out the words. _I know you loved him_ , you could say, _I know you loved him so much and he loved you, and when he left he took a part of you with him, but I don’t know how to help you because no one ever loved me like that, and I don’t think I could ever live with that kind of closeness that comes so near to possession, not close enough or else I guess it wouldn’t be love, but still close, at least the way I see it_.

Sometimes it feels like most of your thoughts remain your secrets, locked inside your head. Your mouth locked shut. You don’t have to. But you do it anyway. Because you’re used to damage control, and for a long time that meant keeping your mouth shut. You don’t have to, always. You know that. Now you do, at least. Things aren’t the same as they used to be, and you can speak, without having to fear. Even if the fear is still there. You tried to make it go away. But maybe it doesn’t, and you just have to live with it next to you following like a stray dog, and it will be there next to you, but you still have to do your own thing. The fear isn’t the enemy. It was trying to protect you, trying to help you to protect yourself in the only ways you could think of.

You’re sitting with your back against the wall, holding onto Boris as he is now (you think) asleep or passed out from drinking, half curled on your lap, his legs stretched out over your red shag rug. You have a feeling one of you will be breaking it off soon enough, but probably saying you will still be friends. You’re worried for him, seriously worried. You don’t want him to fall apart after everything he’s been through.

But you don’t think you’re as afraid for yourself anymore.

_

One day, a week or so after Theo left, you and Boris are listening to one of your mixtapes ( _this city is so fuckin’ messed up…_ ), lying on the rug on your room, under a haze of weed-smoke. You’re mostly silent by now- you tried to talk to him but he doesn’t really want to talk lately. He hasn’t been to school at all. You don’t know where he’s going when you go, because your mom hasn’t asked anything about him hanging around during school hours. You’re lying on your stomach, looking at all the different pieces of fiber in the rug, like blades of beige fuzzy grass, when Boris, without a word, gets up. Probably to the bathroom to do a line or something. You’ve told him to slow down, but he doesn’t listen. He listens even less than ever. And it’s not just because of you, in the way that you’re usually not listened to- Boris would listen to you before even if he didn’t do what you suggested. Now it’s like nothing you say is even registering.

Your mom took you aside the other day; even she was concerned, asking “Kerry, Boris has been here almost every day and spending the night. Has something happened to him at home with his father? Do you think it would help if I talked to him, if he had an adult’s support?” You just shook your head and shrugged.

“I don’t know,” you said. You could sense some guilt in her voice- if she could help Boris, would it make up for how she didn’t know what was happening to you. But you’ve forgiven her, or maybe that’s not the right word for it, because you never blamed her. Sure, Bradley was awful and even your mom knew that when she was seeing him, but she didn’t know anything else. _Your daughter has severe behavioral problems_ , a teacher told your mom over the phone, and she rolled her eyes. A guidance counselor said _Kerry has a great deal of anger inside of her that makes me concerned for what is happening at home, especially based on things other students say about her_ , but she bit her glittery gold lips and seemed to shrink into her chair which made you feel even worse _._ Probably the same guidance counselor who told you snappishly in September, “look, I have a lot of appointments. Are you sure you’ve really thought through coming back? After everything?” All judgmental, making it clear you weren’t welcome.

Maybe your mom blames herself sometimes. But you don’t blame her. You’ve told her, but maybe she doesn’t believe it, you hope she doesn’t think you’re lying to her about it. 

You realize, in your thoughts and lying in the softness of the rug, Boris has been gone a while. You see the bathroom door is closed. “Boris?” he doesn’t answer. You knock, and it’s quiet. You can’t hear any water running, you think, and that’s a good sign. You open the door slowly, not sure what you’re going to see. You would have heard if he came out, you know. You would have heard your mom talking to him in the other room or him leaving or something.

When you open the door you find Boris passed out on the floor, an empty plastic bag at his side. _How much did you take, Boris? And what did you take?_ You’re not even sure anymore, you realize. You aren’t sure of what he wouldn’t put in himself anymore. He still has a pulse, you can feel it on his neck and wrist. You drag him upwards so that he’s kind of on his knees, his back leaned against the wall. He’s gotten so much lighter, you realize, his Never Summer shirt is so much bigger on him than before. You make sure his head isn’t tilted backwards as you stick your finger down his throat until he’s awake and whatever he took is mostly on the floor.

His eyes flicker open slowly, like he’s sick and has been woken in the middle of the night. “Kot…Kotku?” he asks deliriously.

“Oh fuck. Thank God you’re alive,” you say after a moment of being unable to speak, “I was worried you’d killed yourself or something when you weren’t answering, I don’t even…..” You won’t let yourself cry or get carried away, you tell yourself, that can be for later, when you’re alone. When this is done. You take a deep breath. “Boris,” you say, vaguely wondering if you should be asking him what year it is or who the president is or how many fingers are you holding up, “what did you take.”

He gestures vaguely to the plastic bag. “All of it,” he says, sniffing. “All of the pills. Did not count…” his eyes close and reopen. “Green things. Cannot think of their name right now…” He coughs, and you realize that one day you’re going to be looking back at this, and you’re going to think, _we were just kids, we were just fucking kids_ …The world isn’t fair. You know that. You’re not blaming it. But it’s hard not to be angry and frustrated and sad about it. Sometimes you don’t know how not to be.

“Okay... Boris?” you tell him, and he nods. “I think we have to call you an ambulance.”

“Mm,” he shakes his head. “I will be okay.” He tries to smile, but it comes out looking wrong. “You helped me…”

“No, Boris,” you say, solemnly. “I think you almost died. And I’m not going to sit in my room and be okay with you dying. I’m just so tired, Boris. Of everything. And I know you are too. And that’s why you have to stop.” You don’t think he’s present enough to understand some of what you’re saying, but you still feel you have to say it.

You go outside, where your mom is talking with a neighbor, and you tell her she has to come inside now, and the look of worry and your tone of urgency is enough to get her saying goodbye and turning around just like that. “Mom, we have to call an ambulance.” Your mother calls it in even though you say you can do it. She makes the call sitting on the floor, putting her hand to Boris’ forehead.

In the ambulance, your mom sits in the front seat near the ambulance driver and you’re in the back with Boris. “She saved my life,” he tells the EMT as he’s lying on a stretcher, trying to gesture toward you with his hand, trying to smile but just baring his teeth.

_No I didn’t, I just saved you today, you’re the only one you can save your whole life_ , you think. But you don’t say anything. All you do is nod or shake your head or say yes or no or I don’t know if the people ask you anything.

You hold Boris’ limp hand in the ambulance until you get to the hospital. “He’ll be fine,” the EMT assures you. I don’t know about that, you can’t help but think. “Some of that is due to you.” Sure. For today. This world tests people like you and Boris, makes people like you think you can take anything because you’ve had to take a lot, until you can’t take it anymore, until you reach a breaking point. Maybe part of it is this city, but you don’t think it’s just the city.

When you were a kid, you remember, you imagined both Heaven and Hell to look like photo negatives of each other, both similar to Vegas, the desert, home.

In the waiting room your mom puts her arm around you as a football game plays on the small TV. “He’ll be okay,” she says, her black hair looking indistinguishable from yours, except for your orange streaks as you lean together. “What you did, Kerry- you saved his life. If you had just called the ambulance and waited for the doctors to take care of him,” you think to yourself that she was the one who called, “it…may have been too late to do anything.” You can feel yourself beginning to cry- the tightness in your throat, the wetness in your eyes- but you try to stop it.

You can feel your mom’s shoulders shaking. “I know I’m not perfect, Kerry. God knows I’ve made mistakes,” her voice is cracking and you want to tell her to stop, please, stop blaming herself. “I couldn’t protect you. I’ve let you down so many times.” _You haven’t,_ you want to tell her. _If not for you I would have done shit to Bradley that would have landed me in jail. If not for you I would have never learned how to be creative or brave, or to see the good in anything. If not for you I would have been alone in the world. If not for you I would have never come back home. Most of my happy memories come from when I was a kid and it was just us._ “But…you’re amazing, Kerry, I just hope you know that. I’m so proud of you. I love you so much. I hope you know that,” she tells you and by then your face is pressed against her chest and you’re crying silently into her as she wraps her arms around you.

You want to tell her that she’s the amazing person, that you’ve defended her so many times to your classmates and you’d do it all over again, that if you could go back in time you’d make sure Bradley would never go near her and not just for your sake. That when everyone was saying she was bad and unfit and wrong, all you could see was someone kind and considerate despite how shit the world was, someone who wasn’t afraid to be beautiful and brave enough to stand out, someone who was honest and understanding and taught you things school would never tell you, showed you that sometimes the most special moments can happen in a lonely motel in the middle of the desert, if you have the right people with you. That you think she’s the only person you have in this world, and you don’t regret that, because no one you know is anything like her. Because she loved you when no one else ever thought you deserved love, and loves you now. And if she’s the only person who ever loved you, then that’s not something you feel sad about.

“I know,” you tell her. “And I don’t want you to blame yourself or feel like you did anything wrong.” You tell her the opposite of what people said of her - “You’re a good person, Mom. I love you.”

You hold onto each other in the crowded waiting room, in your own world of the two of you, just as everyone else around you in this room is in their own world. You close your eyes and smell your mom’s perfume that is the scent of the ocean, and you pretend you’re there, at some seashore, just the two of you.

_

After they let Boris out of the hospital he comes to your place. You walk down to the vending machine by the other side of the motel to get sodas, both of you very quiet as you walk. “Boris,” you tell him. “I’m not mad. I swear. But…you almost died. Was that what you were trying to do?”

He doesn’t answer at first. “No, of course not,” he says, listlessly. “I really cannot thank you enough for what you did.” He doesn’t even look at you.

“Boris, listen to me,” you say, trying to keep your voice even and calm. “You’ve survived so much. You’re not alone.”

“I am so sorry, Kotku,” he looks at you then. He only seems to see you for a slight moment. “But I am.”

You take a deep breath, realizing you’re both walking in a circle around the motel grounds, the vending machine and the sodas forgotten. “I know I’m not him, Boris. I know that, believe me. But don’t keep doing this. You owe that to yourself. Do you hear me?”

He nods slowly. “I’m trying to quit,” you tell him then. “All that shit. I don’t want to get hooked on anything really bad, and I don’t want to OD, ever. I want to be free of it. I’m not telling you how to live your life. But…” _I don’t want you to die_ , you could say, _I’ve seen so much suffering and so much death and so many people destroyed by drugs, and if I can’t make it stop then I don’t want to be one, I don’t want you to be one either._ He could probably say the same and maybe in another universe parallel to this one, if they exist, your places are reversed and he’s saying it to you.

Boris looks at you clearly for what seems the first time in a long while. He takes you by the shoulder and smiles sadly at you. “I know, Kotku.”

“You’re my friend, Boris. You’re my only real friend. Just promise me you won’t give up,” you say, your throat tightening. “You have to keep going. That’s what I did. And I’m not stopping. Even when I feel like it.” The truth is, you don’t feel like that anymore. That stopped a long time ago. 

He nods, closing his eyes. Then he steps away from you. It seems like a year ago you thought you were about to break up, but now you think, it already happened, you just stayed by each other’s side anyway. He’s leaving you, you think. Maybe not officially, this second, but it’s happening now. “I have to go take care of something, Kotku,” he says, slowly, like he wants to spend time on every word ending with your name.

“Hey Boris,” you say, before the both of you turn away.

“Eh?” he asks.

“I remember I told you something when we first met.” He raises his eyebrows a bit. “Cats always land on their feet.” Not every time, technically, but a lot of the time. Enough to make a difference. “You know?”

He nods. “Yah,” he says. “I know what you mean.” He is quiet for a moment, just standing there like he’s trying to think of what to say. “I’m sorry,” he tells you. You don’t know what he’s apologizing for. For everything, for some things, for today.

I forgive you, you could say. What are you apologizing for, you could ask. It doesn’t even matter, you could say. But you don’t say any of that. He knows you understand. But you can still tell him how. “You have to learn to forgive yourself, Boris,” you tell him. Not even for anything to do with you. Because you know his life has weighed on him, all he’s seen, all that his father has done to him and other people and the world that he couldn’t stop. And it hurts him, even if he doesn’t blame himself for all of it, even if he doesn’t realize when he’s blaming himself. “That’s what I did. And I guess it worked well enough and I did the best I could.”

“Yeah,” he tells you, smiling at you in a way that makes him look like when you first met him, “it really did.” Boris looks over his shoulder as if to see how the road looks, then shrugs. “I should go.” Without expecting it, he wraps his thin arms around you. You put your arms around him, and then you let go.

“Good night,” you tell him.

“You too,” he says, and walks off.

_

At school, the guidance counselor, Mr. Sharpe, the one who always brags about having been a social worker, eventually asks you if you know where Boris went because he hasn’t been at school in weeks. You haven’t seen him in a long time either, and you’re not entirely sure where he went, but you know he didn’t go back to his dad’s house. You hope he’ll never go back, and you’re glad you don’t have an answer for the counselor even if you wouldn’t say anyway. You don’t even fucking care, you could have told him, you never cared when he was here, all you care about is making sure the school’s GPAs and test scores and graduation rates look all right. 

They were already asking you about Theo, to verify what his dad’s girlfriend said because she never called back and they never heard from anyone in New York to confirm that he was there, and you wanted to say, yeah, he ran, he’s never coming back and you people can chase him all you like but you can’t do shit once you hit the state lines.

That’s the thing. Some people act like they have all the power in the world, and assume you won’t realize that it has limits.

“Other than that, Kerry,” says Mr. Sharpe, “are things…stable at home?” you laugh a little.

“Yeah,” you say, “it’s all good.” Not by your definition, you think, but by mine.

_ 

When you lie on your bed you think about all the things that have happened here, in your room, in your place, over the years. All the events and memories and visions this place has held. The past lives in here, the present is its physical result. The frayed thread on the edge of your bedspread from when Bradley would come when your mom was out working and you’d pretend you weren’t there and clench the sheet in your fist like if you held it tight enough it would strangle Bradley. The faint remains of glitter handprints on the ceiling from when you and Tina were jumping on the bed and realized you could touch the ceiling and it was like jumping into the sky and you put glitter body lotion on your hands and jumped and jumped until your ceiling glimmered with purple hands, the day you decided to kiss each other quickly, the first time for both of you. The scribbled black sharpie drawing on your wall, a cat by Boris with pointy ears and long whiskers, almost hard to see on the dark brown wood panel wall.

The photos and pictures on your wall- you and your mom in front of the setting sun, a few years ago. Christmas, sixth grade, the small tree decorated in tinsel and white lights and ornaments. A mountain lion picture torn out of a magazine.

_Once there was a girl._

Maybe you and your home are sharing it, your memory, but it’s yours. No one can take it from you, and you can’t get rid of it. And you guess that’s how some things should be. And sometimes, every once in a while, you guess, things turn out how they should be.

_

On a Saturday morning your mom comes into your room, waking you from your half-asleep state. “Kerry?” she asks, softly, but seriously. You sit up and rub yesterday’s eyeliner from the corners of your eyes.

“Mhm?” you say, straightening your bathrobe. You didn’t think it would be this cold, but it is. After all, December just began. It feels like just yesterday it was the summer. It feels like it was a hundred years ago, too.

“I was thinking about something,” she says, sitting on the side of your bed. She’s dressed, wearing jeans with rhinestones on the pockets, a velour jacket, and motorcycle boots.

“Oh,” you say, not exactly sure what she means. But she doesn’t seem angry or like she has really bad news.

“I wanted to talk to you about it. Because it’s your decision, too. But I thought you might say yes. If it was something I was sure you wouldn’t want, I wouldn’t do that,” she says, like she really hopes you understand you know that about her.

“What’s going on,” you ask her, not looking at what time it is, just looking at your mom’s hand on your bed, her pink nails bright against the muted flowers printed on your comforter.

“I was thinking,” she says, like she’s having trouble putting it into words. “I have some money set aside. Kerry, I was really thinking that-” she closes her eyes for a moment. “I was asking you if you’d be all right with moving. You can finish school wherever we go. We can…find somewhere new. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to run away from what we’ve lived through-”

“No,” you assure her, noticing how shaky her voice is. Because you understand leaving wouldn’t be running away if you weren’t going to forget, and if you wanted to leave for more reasons than just getting away. “Of course not. I get it. Don’t worry.”

“If you don’t want to, that’s all right. I just thought you might want to move too.” You nod your head.

“I think I do,” you say. “I think it’s time. And we can always come back and visit.” You realize you would be all right with both- leaving, and coming back sometimes. But not staying for good.

Your mom takes a deep breath in, nodding her head with her eyes closed. “I was thinking since it’s near Christmas. It would be a good time, to do something like this.”

“Yeah,” you say. “No- no, mom, don’t cry.”

“You deserved the world and the things that happened to you here-”

“It’s not your fault,” you insist, trying not to cry yourself. You want to tell her, sometime, when you think she can believe it, that it isn’t her fault, what other people do. That if someone hurts you, it’s not her fault. It’s theirs. And now, you know, it’s not yours either. “This place is always going to be a part of me. I’ll always love it here. It….it taught me what the world is like. But maybe sometimes when you love something you can’t hold onto it forever. You have to let it go.” You think that’s what your mom wants to do. You think that’s what you’ve been preparing to do for a long time without realizing it. “And it’s okay,” you tell her.

Your mom reaches over to you and takes you in her arms for a long time.

“Where did you want to go to?” you ask when you think she’s okay. You don’t have any place in mind, and you think you’d be all right with almost anything.

“A long time ago,” she says, half-smiling, “I wanted to go to Wyoming. I never got that far. Ended up stopping here. But…I don’t regret it now. Maybe it was something we were supposed to do.”

Maybe that’s why you came back, and always knew you were going to come back even from the day you ran away, you think. Because you were waiting for enough time to go by for the world to let you and your mom live together, in peace, or close enough.

You nod your head. “Whenever you’re ready,” you tell her. Because you think you are. You want to get in the car and go deep into the desert and see it in the day and the evening and the middle of the night and the sunrise, all the different versions of it. All the cars and motels and casinos and houses and neighborhoods and plants and animals, all the signs, and all the people in the desert. And then what comes after, what comes next, in the places you’ve never seen before. Because you can and no one is going to stop either of you, and you can also stop whenever you like. Just like the mountain lion. Your mom once said you were a wildcat, but maybe you learned it from her, or she recognized that part of herself in you. Either way, or both.

“A few days,” she says. The sentence is like a sunset, a sunrise, fireworks on New Year’s. A beginning and an end, all at once, but how it’s supposed to be. You’re not alone, neither of you. You have each other, and that’s so much. You’ll always have the world back here, waiting, because it knows you. But you can find out about other places now. Together, you and her can find the world.

“Do you want me to make coffee?” you ask her after a moment.

“Sure,” she says. You get out of bed and walk out of your room, and you see her still on your bed, looking over your walls, smiling a little. She’s still there when you come back. You were always there for each other, even when no one else was there for either of you. Sometimes it was hard to remember.

“Tell me about Wyoming,” you say, handing her a mug. And you think that maybe when you leave and go on your trip, you’ll tell her all about your Vegas, your desert, the one she wasn’t with you to see. The city, when you were all alone. School, the teachers and the fighting, and the parties, the ones with kids your age and the ones with older people you didn’t like but went to anyway because it was somewhere else. Boris and Theo and you, when all three of you were all alone together and you should have all understood one another and maybe now you all do, now that you’re apart. You’ll tell her what she doesn’t know, what you think she should know, so she understands you enough to know you don’t judge her, and that if you hate a place that doesn’t mean you don’t love it too and that doesn’t mean it isn’t your home, it just means, maybe you need to find a new one. You think about what you can tell her. But then she starts talking, telling you about what she wants you to know, about her world, about her home and about the home she wants, about herself. She tells you, and you listen.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted for a long time to write something from Kotku's perspective. Then this happened. Thank you for reading.


End file.
